Imagine a life where every breath feels like your last one; where two or three steps lead to you gasping for air; where a simple cough results in you vomiting blood; where even if your heart’s desire is to run around with your friends, it simply refuses to let you.

When his brain started to swell to the point that 5-year-old Joseph couldn’t hold it up or even walk, a local spiritualist told Afua to leave him by the river to be claimed by a river god. That’s when the local church stepped in.

Eighteen-month-old Precious was suffering from HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malnutrition. Under the weight of disease and neglect, her beautiful little creation of a body was under attack with no one to fight to give her life a chance.

Imagine a hole in the ground with a wooden box over it. That hole and that box are the only place you can go to the bathroom. That one hole and that one box are also the only place that 250 other children can go to the bathroom.

Celebrating Christmas at a child development center in El Salvador means giraffes, bumblebees and donkeys! And in the midst of the carols and wrapping paper, God taught me so much about His heart for the poor — and my responsibility to His children.

Tea lost in the jungle, tucked away until its time to bloom. Only the jungle may be seen at first, but the villagers know what they have planted in the middle of that thicket. They’ve planted hope. Hope to break their cycle of rural poverty.

Abandoned by their parents, 14-year-old Larpopo had become the head of her household and four siblings. When a fire burned down their bamboo hut, Larpolo wasn’t sure how her or her siblings would recover from such a devastating loss.

Faced with 5 years of drought and famine, this Kamwaa Child Development Center in Kenya changed the future of the children and families in their community by looking to their natural resources and through our Complementary Intervention Program.

Gladys is the single mother of five children from two marriages. Both of her husbands passed away and she has single-handedly toiled to take care of her children. She tried selling all kinds of things, from secondhand clothing and dishes to vegetables and fried doughnuts. Even though two of her children, Paulina and Michael, were enrolled at a Compassion Child Development Center in Ghana, there was still not much relief. So Paulina was selected to receive aid from our Highly Vulnerable Children’s Fund.

Instead of showing up to the playground for his morning soccer game, little Mamadou woke with a high fever and began to vomit. His mother, Mariam, rushed him to the doctor. Sitting on the back of the bicycle, clutching his mother’s dress tightly, Mamadou quivered throughout the 10km-long ride from their house to the public health center. His mother had only one thought: She hoped her son did not have malaria.